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It was an uneasy crowd that gathered one January evening in an uptown Manhattan YMCA to meet Donald Trump, the developer of grandiose apartment towers who had become their new neighbor by purchasing a huge parcel of prime land overlooking the Hudson River.
Trump has a reputation for getting his own way, overcoming skepticism and opposition to erect 50- and 60-story condominium buildings that make a distinctive statement largely by overwhelming their surroundings.
To these neighbors, concerned about the impact of 15,000 people swarming from a new Trump complex onto their overused subway platforms and calling for help from their single police precinct house, the proper disposition of Trump's 100-acre acquisition would be parkland, not 60-story luxury condominium towers.
Trump started graciously, extracting applause with the remark, "One of the reasons I am here tonight is not to tell you what I want to build, but to ask you people what you want." But he left scarce doubt about whose decision would be final, and on what terms. "I know what in my opinion the community needs," he said. And the final design for the parcel would be based on "economics."
If the neighbors had any notions that they might dissuade him from erecting a complex that might turn their neighborhood from one of quiet brownstone streets into a busy adjunct to a Trump project, they were melting away.
"I don't see you as building villages, Mr. Trump," one woman said. "You build signature buildings. Geoffrey Beene, Gucci, Donald Trump."
Indeed, over the last five years, Donald Trump's signature has appeared over New York like the label on a pair of designer jeans. The prices of units in his best-known buildings are pitched so high that their buyers are often corporations rather than individuals, the epitome of a real-estate market that promotes increasing economic disparity in the central city, where the very poor and the very wealthy coexist, the middle class having been elbowed off a Manhattan that increasingly resembles an island boutique geographically centered at the bronze-glazed, 50-story Trump Tower on 5th Avenue, next door to Tiffany & Co.
Since 1980, Trump has built three major Manhattan buildings-the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Trump Plaza and Trump Tower-and an Atlantic City casino. In August, 1983,...